Recently, the development of mobile telecommunication and the services offered thereby has made large progress.
Particularly, mobile telecommunication systems now also permit access to so-called intelligent peripherals or offer an access to the Internet. Additionally, with an increasing number of services offered, there also arises a need for, e.g., an individual configuration, for each respective user of a terminal device such as a mobile station, of the various services available, or an individual call control. Such an individual and personal configuration of services/call control in turn necessitates a corresponding interaction between the user himself and the network.
It is to be noted that, throughout the present specification, CAMEL and IN designates any solution in which a call, connection or session processing node contacts a service control function which issues instructions to the respective node. The contact to the service control function is based on a trigger information stored in the respective nodes. The trigger information may specify situations in the course of a call, connection or session handling. The service control function may be internally distributed. Moreover, the corresponding IN protocol could be any protocol between a controlling entity, such as a service controller (e.g. CAMEL Service Environment, CSE), responsive to a triggering from a call, and a session or connection processing node. The IN protocol may be e.g. an object oriented interface where the operations are object methods or invocations.
It is to be noted further that throughout the present specification, WAP and WTA designate any solution in which there is a content execution environment (user agent or client, respectively) at the terminal side and this environment is capable of controlling terminal (MS) functionalities such as call control, mobility management MM and user interface. Furthermore, the execution environment may receive content from the network spontaneously or it may be provided with references to content to be downloaded. The content may be hypertext, markup language code, any interpreted or even native or virtual machine code.
Currently, in intelligent networks (hereinafter also referred to as IN-networks), a user interaction is provided for by using in-band announcements and by relying on DTMF (Dual Tone Multiple Frequency) collection.
However, such procedures are often cumbersome and slow from a viewpoint of the user, especially in case the services are used frequently.
An alternative resides in the use of USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Services Data) based user interaction, but the problem with USSD is that USSD messages in itself (without WAP content) do not specify the formatting of the data to the user and the prompting. Similarly, with USSD more complex user dialogues are not possible. For instance, it is difficult for the user to enter multiple information elements at a time in one USSD response, e.g. the user would have to enter delimiters after each information element.
Also, a WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) concept is currently being investigated. According to the concept of WAP, a browser means or so-called user agent and/or client is specified for a terminal device (e.g. mobile station MS). The browser means also supports a WTAI (Wireless Telephony Applications Interface), which enables WAP WML scripts (Wireless Markup Language scripts) or Java scripts as a kind of executable instruction sets or executable program, respectively, to interact with functions of the mobile station such as call control orientated functions. This means, that WML scripts receive event indications from a terminal and can request operations to be performed by the terminal. According to WAP, also applications are supported, according to which a WAP server at the network side providing some content to the terminal side browsing means (user agent) can push WML pages (comparable to HTML pages) (HyperText Markup Language) to the terminal, i.e. to the terminal's user agent.
However, up to now the WAP concept was not defined in terms of providing a user interface between a subscriber terminal and an intelligent network.
Moreover, hitherto, call control functions were implemented which are known as CLIP (calling line identification presentation) and CNAP (calling name identification presentation).
However, these functionalities could not be implemented in case a calling subscriber terminal is a fixed network terminal and were thus rather inflexible and not particularly user friendly.
Also, with previous solutions, control channels of an access network forming part of the intelligent network had to be established for call control signaling purposes, and in case of an incoming call being rejected, those control channels and corresponding allocated access network resources were wasted which could have been used otherwise.